Thursday, March 13, 2008

10 Questions

Hello again and a very Happy Thursday to all & sundry. (Wishing that was "sun-dried", but the only ones seeing any Sun are our beloved antipodean readership!)Today's guest is York's Quiet Man, Reefus Moons! Held in the highest esteem-not only in this household & heart, but also to those in the know. A true treasure who's been at it since the 1988 release, on cassette, of Headcraft, and followed by three more on the Acid Tapes label. Oft-compared to his heroes, Syd Barrett and Robyn Hitchcock -and rightly so, he's also a brother-in-arms to the very English one-man songsmiths Martin Newell and Todd Dillingham as well as adoptive Englishman Anton Barbeau. One need only listen to his musical output and the lyrical content within to know he's possessed of a wonderfully eccentric mind and a bent for the surreal and the non-ordinary. (Life's too short! %^$# ordinary!) His latest release, Waiting For My Albatross,is another stalwart disc brimming with his creative musings. As the reviewer at the Ptolemaic Terrascope said of it:"‘Waiting for my Albatross’ remains a strictly one-man operation. I especially like ‘Sea in a Jar’ with its xylophone / analogue synth decoration and ‘The Loon in the Moon’ a good-timey psychster which merges solo Syd styled whimsy with banjo-shaded country inflections. ‘A Song About Time’ is another high point and seems to resemble a Goffin/King experiment in flower pop once you dig beneath its swirling top coat, while ‘Moss on my Shoes’ is markedly less exuberant, with lines like “There’s two insects on my shoe, at least they’re going somewhere new” showing a potent blend of poignancy and quintessentially English surrealism, coming from a severely undervalued pen. If you’re ever in the YO19 region and see a trail of Zzzzzzs leaking out of a nearby bedroom window, that’ll probably be Mr. Moon catching 400 winks. Leave him be: those thought balloons might just be the backbone of his next album." ("...a severely undervalued pen" indeed!)So, although I could go on and on about Reefus I'll hold off and urge you, dear reader, to seek out his discography. It doesn't disappoint. On with the show:

1.In ten words-or less, define "psychedelic music."

Psychedelic music is basically for the head rather than below the hip.

2. What is the most psychedelic instrument, why?

Sitar, by far, it’s the drone, or, maybe the electric guitar, as it’s been used as the basis of most psychedelic music since the sixties.

3. Favorite psychedelic album of all time?

The Madcap Laughs by Syd Barrett.

4. If you could be a member of any band in history, what band would it be and what would you play?

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s drummer!

5. What era has the best roster of psychedelic music?

The 1960’s, that’s probably when the blueprint of this genre originated.

6. What psychedelic album do you wish more people knew about?

The Soft Boys: ‘Underwater Moonlight’.

7. What band, active today, most defines "psychedelic" to you?

I don’t really listen to that much music these days so I couldn’t really say. I listen to a lot of birdsong, in fact, if you slow down the song of the Skylark, it’s phenomenally psychedelic.

8. What album would you most like to cover in its entirety, why?

Syd Barrett’s ‘Madcap Laughs’, as a tribute to a hero of mine and the sparseness of the instrumentation on the album lends itself very well to re-interpretation of the songs.